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21 e-Discovery Innovations You May Not Have Heard Of

Before we narrowed down our Innovation Awards participants into six finalists, we had about two dozen impressive entries to consider. For a third consecutive year, e-discovery teams from across the legal industry submitted some incredible work—work that’s changing the face of not just e-discovery, but various other projects that can be better handled with e-discovery software.

In admiring the submissions, we noticed five areas where customers are focusing their development efforts and problem-solving prowess. They give a nod to the trends around growing data volumes and diversity, greater demand for cost-effectiveness and ROI across legal work, and an increased reliance on advanced searching and analytics tools that help projects move faster. For those who want to dig deeper into the participants, here’s a peek at many of them.

Review and production of new data types.

1. Anexsys – RTK.Message

The review of messaging and social media data was presenting a variety of challenges to Anexsys’s customers. They built RTK.Message to correctly process social media and messaging sources, resulting in review-friendly data displayed in the Relativity document viewer. Harnessing the power of the Relativity UI, Anexsys built custom dashboards for reviewers to make it easier to analyze and investigate messaging data once in Relativity. Using this visual approach to analysis, one Anexsys customer reduced the number of messages to review by 92 percent.

2. Deloitte – Audio Assistant

Deloitte often finds audio data in review, but without a way to examine that data in Relativity, these files can be a challenge. Audio Assistant transcribes audio files behind the firewall, returning a temporary transcription text file for users to examine and decide if the clip should be fully transcribed for review. Audio Assistant also provides a confidence level on the transcription, allowing users to jump to areas that need attention and get on with the review.

3. HaystackID – Cellebrite Integrator 2.0

With mobile phone data collection becoming increasingly common, Haystack ID found themselves and their customers flipping through disorganized conversations among thousands of pages of PDF reports and spreadsheet records exported from their mobile acquisition tool, Cellebrite. To handle this challenge, they created Cellebrite Integrator 2.0 to ingest, organize, review, and act on phone data in Relativity. With the ability to thread and visualize phone conversations, their clients can search across multiple mobile messaging apps and, in some matters, have been able to quickly cull out up to 95 percent of mobile phone data, while getting a complete understanding of all related communications.

4. LDiscovery – A/V Suite*

LDiscovery A/V Suite for Relativity simplifies the review of multimedia files using a proprietary plugin for the Relativity document viewer. From right within the viewer, users can review video and audio files, visualize audio files in waveform, and have precise playback control—without the need for additional software. A/V Suite also allows users to redact audio files, making a previously impossible task not only possible, but simple.

Enhanced search and analytics capabilities.

5. CDS – Visual Search*

CDS wanted to give their customers easier ways to work with and understand the impact of search results across large data sets. They created CDS Visual Search, which leverages Relativity Data Grid, and unlocks additional features of Elastic Search to enrich the data. Visual Search visually displays groups of documents related to search terms in real time. Visuals update on the fly as search terms are changed and revised so you can quickly test keywords to determine relevancy and accuracy, while gaining a deeper understanding of how documents in the case relate to one another. Automatically generated color coding, cluster labels, and snippet views of documents offer more intelligence than ever before for your keyword analysis.

6. DTI’s Relativity Workspace Scorecard

DTI knows that user actions, such as resource-intensive search queries, impact workspace performance and productivity. Using a custom agent, a scoring algorithm, and graphical reporting, they created a Workspace Scorecard to scan their Relativity workspaces and determine where searches can be optimized for a better user experience. This has allowed DTI to be more proactive with nearly 200 clients using the tool, drive informed conversations around building searches, and deliver a better performing environment.

7. KordaMentha – Learning-based Assisted Review Protocol

A law firm client had a set of 250,000 documents, 20 business days to complete the review, and only six reviewers. Rather than use a traditional Relativity Assisted Review process, where statistics determine when the review is “done,” KordaMentha created a “Learning-based Assisted Review Protocol” to put the decision back in the hands of the legal team. They used custom scripts and reporting to continually focus on the most relevant documents by rank, creating a more flexible, user-driven model that removed the need to select an acceptable level of risk ahead of time, or start over when changing the document set or criteria. The legal team was comfortable making the decision to produce based on reviewing only 14 percent of the corpus, and finished the review on time.

8. Kroll Ontrack – Communication Insight*

Kroll’s Communication Insight makes the analysis and review of email more effective by bringing additional intelligence to the Relativity document list—offering visual indicators to clearly see coding decisions across threads, showing inclusive email counts, and highlighting changes to email threads—such as added or removed recipients—and a Name Normalization feature that allows you to assign any number of email addresses to a single name. These tools allow users to uncover additional information such as missing custodians, gaps in data collection, or previously overlooked keywords. One Kroll Ontrack customer quickly discovered additional custodians and more than 1,000 missing emails within conversations.

Project and matter management.

9. Compliance – Discovery-as-a-Service

Compliance’s integrated Discovery-as-a-Service platform allows clients to upload, process, filter, host, review, and produce on demand, using built-in management tools and a portal in Relativity. The portal allows clients to upload data directly, access backend resources, and administer users, groups, and workspaces as if they were full Relativity admins. However, clients enjoy an additional layer of security, allowing access only to assigned resources. The solution also allows easy communication between PMs, case teams, and tech support, on-the-fly foreign language document translation, and tracking and dashboard features.

10. D4 – MD4

D4 knew certain workspace setups were causing slower performance, but it wasn’t always easy to identify these snags. To answer this question, they built MD4 Environment Evaluation to run a health check on their Relativity environment nightly. Now D4 project teams can use the MD4 Diagnosis custom page to review workspace metrics against acceptable thresholds, and have informed workflow conversations with their users to improve overall workspace performance by adjusting things like searches and folder structures.

11. Faegre Baker Daniels – Media and Productions Tracker

When media, such as hard drives, discs, and thumb drives, were brought into discovery, Faegre Baker Daniels wanted a better solution than manually tracking them with spreadsheets. With Media and Productions Tracker in Relativity, their case teams and customers now have a single source of truth to record and track collection, production, and chain of custody information.

12. Finnegan – Relativity Case Explorer

Paralegals at Finnegan were using legacy software to convert pleadings, exhibits, and other case documents into PDFs. The litigation support team would then have to export the documents and load them into Relativity. This whole process was being tracked in spreadsheets. Finnegan’s Relativity Case Explorer app allows their paralegals to create images of case documents, link them to Relativity objects corresponding to their case, and make them automatically searchable, removing the need for paralegals to use a separate tool.

13. FRONTEO TRUST – Business Intelligence Portal

Fronteo’s customers were unable to perform cross-case analytics or glean insights to make data-driven decisions about their usage. With Fronteo Trust Business Intelligence Portal, customers get a highly visual and intuitive view of their usage and storage data, allowing them to make business decisions based on live metrics, across workspaces.

14. Kilpatrick Townsend – Litintake 2.0*

Kilpatrick wanted a way to pull all customer information into a single dashboard to offer customers and case teams a 360-degree project view. Litintake 2.0 is a robust, defensible matter management tool that tracks information from many data sources, such as accounting systems, document management systems, and the Thomson Reuters Elite enterprise business management solution, all in Relativity. Clients and case teams can find case details, media, production logs and profiles, and more while also using real-time charts to quickly analyze budgets and send clients regular status updates.

15. NightOwl – nSight

NightOwl’s customers were looking for a secure, real-time portfolio of their users and data in active Relativity workspaces across various instances. To provide these stakeholders with these resources, they created nSight, which builds upon the innovation they introduced last year called MissionControl, to track every data point across their global discovery operations. With nSight, NightOwl’s managed service customers get complete insight and improved management of all of their custodians and data no matter where they reside.

16. Sidley Austin – Products Liability Tracking*

Sidley Austin was tracking product liability claims in legacy software that was not being updated or enhanced, and that only one person on staff was capable of using. By building a custom tracking application in Relativity, Sidley Austin’s products liability team is able to track all relevant information about a claim in one place. Users can link the associated documents, link previous case records to the new record for reference, and notify the responsible attorney of important dates for trials and hearings. Because the team was already acquainted with Relativity, they required minimal training to jump into the tracker and get started.

Easier ways to handle Excel documents.

17. Lighthouse – RedactSmart

Lighthouse hosts data that includes sensitive conference call codes and pins for large organizations. Ensuring these numbers and passcodes are redacted is a high priority, but it’s also time-consuming, tedious, and costly. Using regular expressions to find the patterns of these codes, RedactSmart automatically draws redactions, tracks the status of these documents, and helps the team QC the redactions through a report. This has confidently reduced the inherent risk in litigation activities for some of their largest customers.

18. XACT – BlackBar

Because spreadsheets don’t lend themselves well to analysis outside their native application, XACT’s customers were spending valuable time imaging Excel documents and manually redacting thousands of pages to get them ready for production. Tired of this process, they created BlackBar, which allows users to redact spreadsheets directly in Excel, with a defensible process that tracks all actions performed in Relativity. This process eliminates the need to image Excel documents before redacting, making redactions easier and more precise, and allowing users to produce Excel files natively.

Use cases outside e-discovery.

19. Clutch Group – TradeIQ

A Clutch Group customer needed to provide a detailed chronology of relevant communications for more than 200 complex securities trades. The review included various media types and more than 100 custodians. They created Trade.IQ on Relativity to build chronologies from messaging data, emails, and audio transcripts. With interactive graphical representations of the data, the application organizes all flagged excerpts in a readable, sequential format. Using Trade.IQ and Analytics, Clutch Group was able to reduce the customer’s reviewable dataset by 98 percent.

20. HaystackID – eCTD Compliance Review Module

eCTD is a format used by pharmaceutical companies to transmit regulatory information to government agencies, which is not designed for e-discovery. It includes a complex load file with a folder structure that specifically correlates to document types required by the FDA. In a complex patent litigation, an Am Law 25 firm needed an easy-to-use, cost-effective, defensible eCTD tool to parse these files all within Relativity for review. Using the metadata to understand revision history was very important in this case. HaystackID's solution helped the customer focus on the most relevant documents, build a timeline, and avoid missing critical facts or over-producing to the opposing party.

21. Reed Smith – Consent Tracker*

When a client wanted to sell several business units, Reed Smith needed to quickly identify all contracts that would require third-party consent, in order to assess risk and prioritize which business units should be sold first. They used Analytics to cluster about 10,000 contracts and identify patterns and groups in the contract set. Then, Reed Smith used concept search to begin homing in on ‘hot clauses,’ which would require review. Finally, they used dynamic objects to track consent status and automatically notify the client of progress, throughout a review involving attorneys in many languages and countries around the world. Using thi